The hardcore brotherhood: How punk's toughest scene thrashed its way into N.J. history

The grating, guttural screams are, at first listen, incomprehensible. The slogging, lumbering guitar riffs chug and trudge, or spill wildly into pummeling madness. The drums shift between cracks of speed-freak frenzy and slow, patterned pounds so thunderous they might summon a heinous creature from the depths.

It's referred to simply as "hardcore" -- punk rock's most assailing subgenre. Critics regard the bands as too barbaric and brash; the concerts as indisputably dangerous. The music, they say, is as an undeniably poor influence on suburban youth.

To most others, hardcore isn't any of these things -- it's simply invisible. Very few radio stations play its records. Mainstream media does not report its news.

But in New Jersey, this music thrives. From all corners of the state -- New Brunswick and Brick; Warren County and Montclair -- exists a proud community of bands and their vehemently loyal supporters. And though the genre may have originally been spawned in Washington D.C. and New York, the Garden State, in many respects, is where hardcore has come to forge its purest voice.

"From the outside looking in, people think, 'Oh that's just a bunch of angry kids yelling about nothing' and will write it off," says Ryan Taylor, 27, the singer for brutal Jersey outfit Suburban Scum, one of the most popular bands on the New Jersey hardcore scene.

"But these are the kids that are actually trying to stand up and say something about things going on in the world, whether it's war, sexism, drugs, whatever."

Adds Joey Southside, singer of Bloomfield's The Banner: "Hardcore appeals to something that's within everybody. You get that ball of rage inside you and go to a show, and you scream and you yell and you jump around and you get that stuff out."

Hardcore highway

On a torrid Saturday in August, the New Jersey hardcore scene thumps its collective chest. The Mongoloids, an Edison-based group on the scene since 2005 and considered ones of Jersey's top hardcore groups, is playing its final show. After nearly a decade of international touring, five solo albums and several lineup changes, outspoken singer Greg Falchetto and his guys are putting the band to rest in favor of new endeavors.

Twenty bands from Jersey and along the East Coast have converged at Gamechanger World in Howell for The Mongoloids' farewell. Hundreds of fans thrash to the pulverizing tunes. By the time The Mongoloids take the stage around 10 p.m., most of the bony teens and burly, bearded men in the crowd have spent eight hours in the sweltering, un-air-conditioned hall. The dance floor is so soaked with sweat it has become a veritable Slip 'N Slide.

"That was easily the biggest New Jersey hardcore show since 'Hellfest' in 2004," Falchetto recalled later.

For nearly the entire history of hardcore, New Jersey has played an integral part in the genre's development. The music first dug its heels into American counterculture in the late '70s and early '80s, as a faster, heavier take on records released by popular punk bands like Sex Pistols, from the U.K. and The Ramones, from New York City.

Now-seminal hardcore bands Bad Brains, Minor Threat, S.O.A. and The Teen Idles tore through Washington D.C. between 1977 and 1980, and this new, more menacing style soon trickled northward into New York. In 1981, the trouncing four-piece Agnostic Front formed, and a few years later released "Victim in Pain," now a beloved hardcore staple. The Mongoloids opened for Agnostic Front in 2011 and 2012.

Cro-Mags, best known for their genre-shaping 1986 debut "The Age of Quarrel," blended heavy metal into their sound. Other New York favorites Murphy's Law, Sick of it All and Sheer Terror were also building a passionate fan base at the time.

With bands traveling between the burgeoning East Coast scene's two most enterprising cities, New Jersey proved the perfect rest stop on the hardcore highway.

"New Jersey took the sacred ground between those two, taking some of the innovation of D.C.'s Bad Brains and mixing it with the brutality and heaviness of New York hardcore," says Jesse Cannon, a music producer and author based in Union City.

"Jersey is a really vital place (for hardcore)," adds Brian Cogan, a Staten Island native and author of 2008's "Encyclopedia of Punk." Cogan cites Elmwood Park's Adrenalin O.D. as one of the early bands that took a more melodic approach to New York-style hardcore and helped to develop a unique New Jersey sound.

In addition to Adrenalin O.D., the first crop of Jersey hardcore bands included Toms River's Hogan's Heroes and Lodi's Rosemary's Babies, who all played furiously wherever they could find room in the state. One of their favored venues was City Gardens, a punk club on crime-ridden Calhoun Street in Trenton.

"For the hardcore scene, City Gardens was huge," says Steve DiLodovico, a Gardens regular who, with co-author Amy Yates Wuelfing, published the club's detailed oral history in March.

The concrete hub held more than 1,000 fans, and allowed budding bands like Bridgewater's Vision and Bergenfield's Mucky Pup to play for large crowds, while opening for brand-name groups like The Ramones and The Beastie Boys through the '80s and early '90s.

In DiLodovico and Wuelfing's book, "No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes," show-goers recall City Gardens as a common ground, not just for bands but for fans as well, who could arrive sporting blue hair and combat boots, flail around like lunatics and not be judged.

The venue was, in this sense, a purveyor of hardcore's most universal values.

"The core of (hardcore) is 'respect one another' even if that means respecting someone who's crazy," DiLodovico says. "Because of what punk and hardcore is, it attracts the fringe, and most unstable kinds of personalities, but there's always been a deep respect."

Mobilizing

City Gardens continued to operate into the early '90s, booking Jersey acts like New Brunswick punkers The Bouncing Souls and Newark native Ice-T's Body Count, alongside groups like Nirvana, Green Day and Nine Inch Nails.

By the time City Gardens stopped scheduling hardcore shows in the mid-'90s, the scene had never been stronger, and bands like Trenton's Mouthpiece and Elizabeth's NJ Bloodline and E-Town Concrete had grown large enough to justify national and international tours.

"You go to Croatia and there's bands imitating New York, New Jersey and D.C. culture," Cannon says. "New Jersey suburbs are so much what hardcore is about: suburban struggle and alienation with the suburbs."

The influence of hardcore could be felt closer to home, too. In 1990, Lifetime -- a feverish punk band loyal to the legendary New Brunswick basement circuit -- emerged and would eventually inject pop flourishes into their rapid-fire tunes. Princeton's Saves the Day adopted and polished this style in the later '90s.

You have no doubt heard blink-182's ubiquitous 2000 hit "All The Small Things." But without the influence of these hardcore crossovers, you may have never heard from them at all.

Still, even the genre's most celebrated bands like Los Angeles's Terror or Salem, Mass.'s Converge have never graced the covers of Spin or Rolling Stone -- and likely never will.

"Once you put a pop-punk or metal influence into your sound, it's a million times easier to get a fan base," says Cannon. "The more you go with a traditional hardcore or straight-edge punk style, the less you appeal to the teenage girls."

All of which makes the agents of hardcore part of a long -- and frustrating -- tradition: Influential artists who nonetheless can't make a living from their art.

"Everybody works," says Suburban Scum's Taylor, who's employed at a screen-printing shop near his home during the day.

Fans listen to lead singer Matt Carlock of the Middletown band Back & Forth. Four hardcore bands play at The Meat Locker in Montclair on April 20, 2014. Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-Ledger

Hardcore concerts, although passionately performed, typically draw no more than 200 people; door covers are rarely priced above $10. With such minimal revenue flow on these nights, venues often pay musicians relative to how many supporters they can bring to the show. The newer New Jersey bands who opened for The Mongoloids in August, for instance, were each paid $100 - for four or five members to share.

"Most hardcore bands are happy if they are getting a meal at the end of the show," Taylor says.

Risk and reward

On The Mongoloids' final night in August, several hundred fans knock and batter into each other in the mosh pit or rush the unguarded stage, grabbing at Mongoloids' lead singer Falchetto in attempts to share his microphone and shout the lyrics into it. Dozens of people pile around and on top of the frontman as the turbulent crowd bellows in a unified chant.

This is all encouraged, of course.

Although this summer show was especially large, live hardcore concerts with near matching intensity pop up each weekend around the state, in New Brunswick basements, VFW halls upstate or divey joints like Stanhope House or the graffiti-splattered Meat Locker in Montclair. Injuries are commonplace at live shows as fans bounce into "circle pits," where the most boisterous devotees swing their arms and kick their legs at full force to the music.

"I just snapped it," Falchetto says, referring to the bone above his ankle that he broke years ago while jumping around on stage with The Mongoloids.

Did he finish the show?

"Yeah, of course," he says. "At a hardcore show, you break an arm, break a leg and you don't run and sue someone to try and make money, you take it in stride."

Indeed, for all the risk of bodily harm at hardcore shows, most musicians and fans don't talk of the scene in especially dark or dangerous terms.

Katie Barreto, a 17-year-old fan from Brick, goes to shows with her brother and actually calls the community "a comfort zone" -- one that welcomes women and minorities into a scene that's traditionally white and male.

"You know it's a risk, but it's fun," she says. "You love the music so much, and you're in it for the right reasons -- you get this rush."

And while legitimate fights will occasionally break out in the circle pits, most participants agree that moshing to hardcore music is generally benign in nature.

A fan moshes while Death Threat performs at Gamechanger World in Howell on August 24, 2014. Alex Remnick/The Star-Ledger

"If we went two weeks without a violent incident at the Pipeline and having to call an ambulance, it was a miracle," says Cannon, who used to organize shows at the Newark club. "But that's where you could go to meet people who were going through the same thing as you and we valued that more. The reward was greater than the risk."

Within the scene's overt potential for violence, though, lies a contradiction. A fair percentage of New Jersey hardcore fans follow a traditional code of conduct called "straight edge" -- a pseudo-creed that professes no drinking, smoking or drugs of any kind at any time.

It's especially visible at live shows, as many fans will don printed t-shirts that read "DRUG FREE" "CLEAR MINDED" or "TRUE TIL DEATH." Others have three X's -- the movement's symbol -- tattooed on their arms and legs, or drawn in marker on their hands.

"We always wanted to be a straight edge band," says Falchetto, whose The Mongoloids were the premier Jersey band to profess this lifestyle over the last decade.

Seriously, though -- fans who will openly scream, thrash and bloody someone's face at a show also believe that sipping a beer is beyond their moral threshold?

"I don't look down on someone if they drink, but I see (straight edge) as strength of mind and following your own path," says Falchetto.

Notes Taylor, whose band Suburban Scum includes both drinkers and teetotalers: "If anything it works out. We always have someone to drive home at the end of the night."

'Stronger than ever'

The night in Howell grows late. In one last act of rebellion, The Mongoloids' Falchetto yells to let the cops come and shut them down. He's not about to let anyone kick his band off the last stage it will ever play.

But the group bows out peacefully a few minutes later. Exhausted fans file out, slink to their cars and drive home. The largest New Jersey hardcore event in a decade -- around 750 attendees in all -- has ended.

So what happens now?

Without a band like The Mongoloids to rally around, will the state's hardcore community still unite to host large gatherings like this? Can the growth witnessed on this one night in August be sustained?

Well, yes and no.

Most of the population cannot understand the music, let alone relate to it -- so hardcore's expansion in New Jersey will likely remain gradual.

Members of the Middletown band Back & Forth play with singer Matt Carlock, left, and bass player Matt Cincotta. Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-Ledger

But scene leaders can live with that. Jersey bands like Suburban Scum, Heavy Chains and The Banner uphold the hardcore tradition. And they'll continue to book shows in their brutal neck of the woods, which they believe tops all other U.S. scenes.

"There's no comparison," says The Banner's Southside. "People in Jersey start bands as jokes that are better than bands that have been going on for years in other places."

Southside and Taylor agree that although New Jersey's hardcore support system might be smaller than it was a decade ago, the current level of passion among fans is unparalleled.

"Out of my 10 years going to shows, right now is the best hardcore's ever been," Taylor says.

"As far as quality of bands, and kids who get it, it's stronger now than ever before," Southside adds.

The strength he speaks of appears real as another very large hardcore concert looms on the 2015 calendar. An upcoming show dubbed St. Valentine's Day Massacre II will overrun Starland Ballroom in Sayreville (capacity 2,500) Feb. 14 as E-Town Concrete headlines a bill studded with Jersey and New York bands. Journey-bands VOD, of Long Island, and Brooklyn's Indecision will open, as well as The Banner and Suburban Scum.